Politicians and citizens increasingly engage in political conversations on social media outlets such as Twitter. In this paper I show that the structure of the social networks in which they are embedded can be a source of information about their ideological positions. Under the assumption that social networks are homophilic, I develop a Bayesian Spatial… (More)

Katz and King have previously proposed a statistical model for multiparty election data. They argue that ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression is inappropriate when the dependent variable measures the share of the vote going to each party, and they recommend a superior technique. Regrettably, the Katz–King model requires a high level of statistical… (More)

In countries where citizens have strong grievances against the regime, attempts to address these grievances in the course of daily life are likely to entail high costs coupled with very low chances of success in any meaningful sense; consequently, most citizens will choose not to challenge the regime, thus reflecting the now well-known collective action… (More)

Are legislators responsive to their constituents in their public communication? To what extent are they able to shape voters' preferences, as expressed by the issues they discuss? We address this twofold question with an analysis of all tweets sent by U.S. Members of Congress and a random sample of their followers from January to August 2013. Using a Latent… (More)

This paper develops and tests arguments about how national-level social and institutional factors shape the propensity of individuals to form attachments to political parties. Our tests employ a two-step estimation procedure that has attractive properties when there is a binary dependent variable in the first stage and when the number of second-level units… (More)

Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.) held a press conference to call attention to a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) project that would allow investors to bet on future political events in the Middle East—including terrorist attacks—through a commodity-market style trading system. On July 29, newspapers responded by… (More)

We estimated ideological preferences of 3.8 million Twitter users and, using a data set of nearly 150 million tweets concerning 12 political and nonpolitical issues, explored whether online communication resembles an "echo chamber" (as a result of selective exposure and ideological segregation) or a "national conversation." We observed that information was… (More)

T his paper considers two primary issues about big data: (1) big data as a sample, and (2) a particular type of big data— that is, social media data. We argue that if we can learn things from little data, then we certainly can learn from big data. We think that big data off ers a tremendous opportunity that little data does not. We argue that having more… (More)

Despite many examples to the contrary, most models of elections assume that rules determining the winner will be followed. We present a model where elections are solely a public signal of the incumbent popularity, and citizens can protests against leaders that do not step down from power. Compliance with electoral rules is possible when citizens are… (More)

Following the 1995 Russian parliamentary election, it was suggested that Russian voters may have used their votes to send a message to the then current Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, who was scheduled to run for reelection six months later. Building on this observation, we consider the incentives for information transmission through strategic voting in… (More)